That's odd. There should be a UTF-8 test, but I've never used UTF-8 with DBM::Deep. In theory, you should be able to pass the filehandle in and there are tests for that. Per our email, please send me a failing test. the repos is at http://github.com/robkinyon/dbm-deep

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?

Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?